September 2009

First Things First

I don’t want to start this post on a negative note, but I feel that I owe you guys an explanation as to where I’ve been these last two weeks. Due to a combination of unforeseen circumstances posting has been near impossible for the past fortnight. I’ve had no internet in my new place due to the phone company being incredibly slow, and to add to this I’ve caught the flu (no not swine)! As a result I’ve been lying on the sofa trying to recover, rather than being able to publish all of the great tutorials that I’ve got lined up for the awesome community here.

Now The Real News!

Now to the news that I’m really excited about. I’m happy to announce that PSDFAN now offer a great coding service, after teaming up with industry leaders SnobbySlice.

Introduction

This tutorial is inspired by Zac Vineyard’s “Build Your Own Captcha and Contact Form” on Nettuts+, although what we’ll accomplish here is a very unique way of implementing a captcha. One of the advantages of this kind of implementation is that it gets rid of the need to retain several hundreds or even thousands of images in your server.

One of our readers has emailed in saying that they would like to know how we have made our navigation menu rollover effect, in which a background image expands to the length of each text link in the menu. I have decided to write a tutorial on how we have done this for the WebDesignDev navigation. But first here is the email…

Hey Web Design Dev,

I am Luke Marohn, i am 13 and i also design and develop websites. i’m pretty pro with designing, HTML and CSS, but this is something i cant figure out.

I see this on almost all sites, it has to do with the navigation, it seems as though (for your main navigation) when you roll over “home” or “contact” the width of the green bar is changed to fit the link. i am pretty sure you have a tutorial on that but i cant find it. if you didn’t make a tut on this can you? or send me to another site that has a tutorial on how to do this?

HDR(High Dynamic Range) pictures are serveral different exposures which include normal exposure, over exposure, and under exposure of the same shot which are then merged together to form one image. This is a collection of 20 different techniques for creating superb HDR images.

There are so many cheat sheets around these days, and the same goes for programming languages. Cheat sheets are basically a set of notes to allow programmers quick reference to code. I have compiled a list of many different cheat sheets for many different programming languages. Programming languages included in the list are Ruby, Python, PHP, CSS and many more.

HTML 5 Cheat Sheet

Smashing Magazine has provided us with an awesome HTML 5 cheat sheet. Download

How Come?

OXYLUSDESIGN is literally one of the top three authors on all of the marketplaces. With a membership count exceeding 200,000 members, this is an extraordinary accomplishment that deserves as much praise as we can give!

CSS 3 no doubt is amazing. I have been using slight bits of it in some of my other web projects, and i am more than pleased with it. Its simplicity runs so well with its advanced features such as rounded corner rendering and font file reading. Rounded up here are my 12 favorite tutorials to help you learn many of CSS 3’s new and exciting features very quickly. Please fell free to drop us a comment showcasing what you have made with CSS 3. Enjoy!

Rounded Corners

With CSS 3, you don’t have to have images for each corner (like the old days). It can now render itself!

Time is money and navigating your operating system is likely your most common activity. Optimizing it for your workflow means spending more time working and less time navigating folders, files and applications.

In this tutorial I’ll introduce you to OS X’s Finder toolbar and droplets as well as how to customize them to look great and amp up your workflow productivity.

OS X’s Finder Toolbar

If you’re not already familiar with it, this is the Finder toolbar in OS X (outlined in red).

As you can see, it definitely doesn’t look “stock”. There are several new icons there and some of the default ones have been moved or removed. You can easily customize the toolbar by right clicking the top section of your finder window and selecting “Customize Toolbar…”. You’ll get a menu like this.

As ThemeForest has literally turned into a power-house marketplace in this last year, more and more designers are making template designing their full-time jobs. With this surge in popularity, ThemeForest is going through some changes. Beginning tomorrow, we’ll be hosting a monthly community chat to discuss these changes/enhancements/etc.

This is your chance to sound off on any complaints, ideas for improvements, irritations; and at the very least, you’ll have a chance to chat with your forum buddies on a more personal level.

I assure you that all voices will be considered and passed on to the Envato directors for review. The first chat will begin tomorrow, September 23rd at 5:00 (US Central Time). Please refer here to determine the correct time in your city.

So you’ve decided to pursue further, GREAT! In the last article, we touched a little on Blogger introduction and also its history. Some pros and cons on using Blogger were also deliberately discussed. Today, we’re gonna register for a Blogger account! I hope you’re as excited as I am.

Just click this button to start registering for an account

The whole registration process is really simple and can be divided into three sections namely:

A collection of articles from logo designers who share their tips, tricks and secrets about the process they go through when creating a logo for a client. Including the process which Chris Spooner went through in order to redesign the design bump logo.

Event calendars and date pickers are really useful plugins for web applications. Wordpress does have a date picker, which allow bloggers to schedule the article.

I am a big fan of jQuery, so i always use jQuery Calendar plugins to accomplish my tasks when the clients asked me to implement an event caldendar for them. In this article, i would like to share 9 really useful jQuery Event Calendar and Date Picker plugins that every web designers and developers should know.

Learn how to use sandboxie to protect your windows computer from malicious software, privacy threats like tracking cookies, and damage to windows on your computer because everything is inside a sandbox, and can’t touch your critical areas of your Windows computer which make your PC more secure, and stable.
Download sandboxie from http://www.sandboxie.com/ and install it.
Read the tutorial on how [...]

I have compiled together the ultimate Photoshop tutorial list for web and graphic designers. Mixed in here are a large array of over 760 tutorials from PSD slicing to fantasy art, logo design techniques to text effects, and so many more. Some tutorials are for beginners and some much more advanced. Many thanks to all the websites who have had the time to compile and showcase these lists. Enjoy!

I’ll make this short and sweet: YES! If you live in the United States, you owe taxes on any money you make, whether it be online, offline, or in some alternate universe that the IRS has an ability to track (and they will be able to track it, I promise).

Contrary to what your best friend’s cousin’s sister-in-law’s friend Bob may have said, money made online isn’t different from money made anywhere else. In fact, the only difference between the money that you make online and the money you might make from a US business is that the online company (ie: Envato) won’t be sending you a 1099 at the end of the year – which means it’s your responsibility to record those earnings.The fact is that you are responsible (by law) to report and pay taxes on all income, regardless of its source.

Ensuring that all your files are safe and secure is a must for any web designer. This article assesses a variety of different online services that have proven to be the most affordable and popular over the years.

Why Use Online Backup?

As the owner of an online web hosting company, I know how important it can be to have a backup of all your information from personal files to client files. I’ve lost plenty of important data including website backups, tax information, and web designs over the years. I now use multiple online backup services to ensure that all my data is 100% secured.

The answer is pretty straight forward – Web users are impatient and you only have very little time to draw their attentions. If your website does not load fast enough, the outcome is obvious – users will click on the close button and move on to the next site.

A quick tutorial on how to create a letter pressed text effect using Photoshop by simply just applying different various Photoshop styles. The Tutorial is broken down into simple steps or alternately you can follow the short but sweet screen cast.

First, Envato released their beta version of the API, aptly named Edge. Now, we have a stable and fantastic API to work with that is super powerful and super simple. The latest version (at the time of writing) is release v1. In part one of this two part series, we will look at how to access every single public set from the Envato API and learn how to display it with php.

A great interview with a successful blogger and freelance designer. The man behind design bumps spectacular brand new redesign, also the editor and founder of two great blogs Line 25 and Blog Spoon Graphics.

How Come?

Though Pixelcraft originally signed up a year ago, he’s only recently submitted his first template on ThemeForest – one that has quickly skyrocketed up the charts. amassing over 300 sales! That alone warrants a feature this week!

Today Andy and I decided to produce a top list of our favorite 100 resources that we have used and enjoyed over the past few months. These resources include icons (my personal favorite), Wordpress Themes, Plugins, Software, Applications and some really cool tutorials made by us and other great websites. Let us know which ones you use and what other resources you think should be added to the list! Enjoy!

A comment that comes up fairly often on the
target="_blank" href='http://themeforest.net/forums' title='TF Forums'>ThemeForest Forums is the question of being notified of new comments on your item page. The answer to this question is almost always, “subscribe to your comment feed via rss and you can check it anytime”. This is true, you can actually subscribe to your own comment feed by going to http://themeforest.net/feeds/user_item_comments/USERNAME.atom and replacing the username with your username.

While this is nice and convenient, most users would rather not have to check their item feed a few times a day to see if anyone has commented. While I know this is an issue/feature the devs may work on for the future, we can fix the issue utilizing third party scripts and services. Today, we will have a quick look at 7 RSS to email/sms services you can use to automatically get informed of comments on your item!

Delicious is the most popular social bookmarking service. If you pay attention on WDB, then you may notice that most of WDB’s articles are being saved more than 100 times by Delicious users.

There are a lot of ways for you to display your Delicious saved counts. But today we are going to show you how to use Delicious API together with Wordpress custom field to save and display the Delicious saved counts.

Here’s a collection of horrific commercial Photoshop disasters made by professional graphic designers, who have made a poor job of not paying attention to detail when it comes to retouching photos.

What’s the best way to become a better designer ? learning from your mistakes and other people mistakes. Being careless and not paying attention to detail can have a big impact on your work as designer and can potential ruin your relationships with clients and also potential clients who are considering hiring you for a project.

Tutorials

Yet again another month has gone by, and we will shortly be saying goodbye to the summer and hello to the winter as the evenings begin to draw in. Webdesigndev has done an enormous amount of growing this last month, hitting below 26,000 Alexa rank, and passing the 5,000 RSS subscriber count. There has been some top stuff on the internet in august. So much inspiration, freebies and tutorials, but of course we could only take the best picks.

So here is WebdesignDev’s best of the web for August 2009. If you missed last months Best of The Web July, be sure to check it out!

Photoshop Tutorials

Last week, I launched a new exclusive quick-tip series for our
target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/nettuts">Twitter followers. What makes this screencast series unique is that they’re all five minutes or less, and the topic for each entry comes straight from the community! As these will not be posted on the blogs, the only way to stay up to date is to follow
target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/nettuts"> Nettuts+ and
target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/themeforest">ThemeForest!

I’m pleased to announce that this month’s free file comes courtesy of
target="_blank" href="http://themeforest.net/user/rzepak ">rzepak . Please join me in thanking him for providing us with this wonderful admin template for free! I know I’ll be using it!